#Electronics

I picked up a Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) — an ESP32 with a built-in LCD —

How does a computer add two numbers — not with code, but with actual electronics? In this video we build the circuits that make addition happen at the hardware level, starting from the simplest possible adding circuit and working up to something that can add multi-bit binary numbers.

I’ve built a joystick interface for my Agon Light, using a PCB I found online. This is an improvement on the last time I did this and just stuck wires in the GPIO ports.

I’ve worked out how to work on the same Davinci Resolve project from two different computers, at the same time.

At least polling a physical button can be done with electronics that don’t require running code, meaning you can always program one of the buttons to be a “reset” switch if needed.

I bought a pair of cheapo outdoor solar lights from Amazon. One is on my shed round the back of the house, the other is on the shed at the front of the house. Yes, I have a bit of a shed obsession. After a few days the front one stopped working. I took it apart to find out why…

I have a whole house battery solar system with 3kW of roof mounted panels and 9.6kWh of battery storage. I can monitor this using Home Assistant and it’s interesting to see my power usage and generation stats. Interesting, but not that relevant to daily life.

What is relevant is knowing how long the battery has left, especially now we’re in autumn/winter and the typical British weather is in full effect. As I look out my window right now it’s misty, yesterday it rained all day.

Some more stats on my home solar setup now it’s autumn and daylight seems to be a distant memory.

Here’s how my solar panels and battery system have been performing this month. I might do this more frequently, it’s hard going back in the historical data in my monitoring software and these posts are easy to find.

It’s a crappy cloudy day today. There was about enough sunlight to power the house, but not enough to also charge the batteries.